Walking for hours through pouring rain, chest-high water and dense forests, people living on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast are using GPS (the global positioning system) to create the first-ever maps showing land claims in their remote region.
The inhabitants of the resource-rich area include indigenous peoples and mixed-race, Spanish-speaking Mestizos. But no one has ever mapped the communities’ borders in detail, and as economic pressure mounts to develop and exploit the area’s resources, the ownership issue has become critical.
As a first step toward formalizing land rights, the Central American and Caribbean Research Council, an Austin-based non-governmental organization, collaborated with Nicaragua’s Center for Investigation and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast, to use GPS technology to spell out the claims of each of 127 local communities. To create the maps, members of the communities used GPS to document the position of familiar landmarks, such as trees or crossroads, that form traditional boundaries. At the same time, the local volunteers gathered information about current and historical land use to back their claims. Position data were recorded in waterproof yellow notebooks and later entered into an electronic spreadsheet. The researchers overlaid the GPS-based boundary information and related land-use data on a conventional topographic map.
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